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Preface

I was on the lookout for a good story. You know the kind I mean – big,
with all the great themes - love, hate, anger, greed, sacrifice and
redemption. Ingredients that properly mixed and baked offered a taste
of the pie called the human condition. I was on the lookout and thought
I’d found it the day Dr. Willard Gatewood introduced me to Private
David Fagen, a black American who, in time of war, traded his future
for the chance to help another “colored” people gain freedom.
A tremendous story, it contained all the elements, just what I’d
been looking for, but it was the wrong war.

“No one knows anything
about the Spanish-American War,” I
complained. There’s no sympathy for it, no romance. Where’s
the sizzle, the sparkle? Easy to envision a good story against the
backdrop of
World War II and certainly the Civil War, but the Spanish-American
War? Dr. Gatewood smiled, regarded me indulgently, and then told
me to do my homework. Here’s a little of what I discovered:

Influenced by pro-business conservatives eager to take control of
Spain’s
colonies in the Pacific, in 1898 President McKinley asked Congress
for a Declaration of War, and then launched America’s first
adventure in Imperialism. An unprovoked war of conquest and occupation,
it was
the first time African-American soldiers fought and died in an
overseas war.

America destroyed the weakened
and spiritless Spanish in six weeks. Later, in the Treaty of Paris,
Spain sold her colonies to the United
States for twenty million dollars. Under the banner of liberator,
America occupied Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines and stayed to
rule through
a system of military governorships for nearly fifty years. To establish
and maintain U.S. control, President McKinley implemented a policy
of “Benevolent Assimilation” and sent thousands of soldiers
to enforce it. Desirous of self-rule, the Filipinos resisted American
occupation. A bloody, eight-year campaign ensued against the guerilla
forces. Reports vary, but many suggest more than four hundred thousand
Filipino men, women and children lost their lives in the fight for
independence during this “splendid little war.”

Through
this work of fiction, I endeavor to explore this extraordinary and
highly significant chapter
in our nation’s past, which I
believe echoes other American campaigns for empire in the twentieth
century and beyond.